[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?

Sun Dec 18 22:38:25 UTC 2005

Hello,
  Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living
people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category
"Living person", to do so?  Then we could at least start the laborious
process of visiting every living person page and detecting potentially
libellous material and removing it (eg, turning it into a comment asking
for sources).  Once we'd caught up there could be a revolving door type
process to ensure every page gets looked at every month or so.

"Random page" is a nice button. But what might be even nicer might be
"next unchecked bio", that takes you to the "next" living bio that
hasn't been edited in a month or so.  Random selection is pretty
inefficient.

Steve

> -----Original Message-----

> However, the matter that I believe likely to be of most 
> concern was in the original version of the article and has 
> survived for nearly two months with multiple edits. There 
> were no sources provided for the allegation. Frankly, this 
> problem has the potential to be another big problem with Wikipedia.
> 
> We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of 
> contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures. 
> In particular, we need to ensure that our articles are 
> scrupulous in citing sources. We need to give instructions to 
> recent changes patrollers to be on the lookout for 
> biographies making negative claims without proper sourcing.